So Tuesday was my birthday. In my first class my group had our presentation over our marketing plan. There was one group before us and we had to ask them questions. It seemed like most of the success of their product was based on hope. Probably not the best thing.

My group rocked it. We had t-shirts made up with our brand name on the front and the nutritional label on the back. The guys wore suits with the t-shirt and the girls wore dress pants with the t-shirt. We all looked pretty badass. Then I made buttons which we all wore. I was also wearing a second button that had the backside of a naked clipart man and it said "This Is My Birthday Suit" because it was my birthday and I was wearing a suit. I thought it was funny. Anyway, I had made enough buttons for the class so we handed those out when we were talking about promotions. We also had actual bottles with printed out labels that we stuck on them and we colored the liquid inside to look like our product. The labels looked really good and it could have been an actual product. It was pretty cool. On top of all that, our presentation went really well. It seemed like marketing plan was actually well planned out and could be feasible. For our expenses we had reasons for all of our numbers and they made sense. This generally wasn't the case with the other groups. Of course I may be a little biased but my group was definitely the best.

After class I went home so I could finish some homework before my next class. In that next class we had presentations. The project in that class was to pick a product that wasn't currently a market lead and come up with a plan to move them up. Most of the groups kind of sucked. Not so much in their presentation but just the idea. One group picked Sprint/Nextel and their new campaign consisted of going after the business market and emphasizing the walkie talkie feature on their phones. But, Sprint/Nextel already had or has a big campaign consisting of going after the business market and emphasizing the walkie talkie feature on their phones. Another group had the Zune mp3 player. Their main idea was to try and connect it more to the Microsoft name and their slogan was "Everlasting Youth." Um, not so much. I don't think Zune would want to buddy up to the Microsoft name. Of late, especially with Vista, I would want to distance myself from the Microsoft name. And, when I think of "Everlasting Youth" I don't think of Microsoft. If anything that may be attached to Apple but Microsoft, not so much.

Eventually it was time for dinner with my mom, sister, and grandma. My mom wanted to go out and we eventually settled on Valentino's. Turns out it was kids-eat-free night. There were little kids everywhere. They also had a cotton candy machine going which was entirely too loud and it was hard to hear what anyone was saying. It was nice getting out of there. Then we went over to my grandma's for birthday cake.

After that was all over we went home and then I went to pick up my friend so we could hang out. That was good times. We ended up talking and watching TV. She ended up getting me a few things, including the first two seasons of Gilmore Girls. I'm a dude and it's probably rare to find a dude that will admit to liking Gilmore Girls but it's just a good show. There's no denying it. Overall I think she spent way to much considering I didn't want anything in the first place but I really did appreciate it all.

On Wednesday after a group meeting I went to get some Chipotle. Apparently in honor of teacher appreciate week, teachers got a free burrito on Wednesday. I was not aware of this and it took me 45 minutes just to find a parking spot within walking distance. After all of that the burrito pretty much sucked because the dude scraped the rice out of the bottom of the container so it was all overcooked and hard. No me gusto.

On Thursday I had my final group presentation. This was in the class where we took a non-market leading product and tried to make it into one. My group decided to go with Doyle Boston sails. We wanted to position them as a leisure sailing option, not just top-of-the-line racing sails. Anyway, we rocked it. Sort of. This was the group where the me and one other person did most of the work. This became very obvious during the presentation. The opening and closing guy is really good at presentations but his information sucked. To the audience it probably wasn't obvious but most of what he was saying was completely wrong. I had to keep reminding myself that the audience didn't know it was wrong.

Then, the next guy, completely froze. He was talking for maybe a minute and then lost his train of thought and just froze up. Instead of going to the next slide, the guy who did the intro just left it there so there was an awkward silence. Then the teacher tried to save him and said it was because of all the noise from the construction coming in the open windows. So we shut those and in that time the guy didn't advance the slides so there was still some awkwardness before we moved on. It was pretty classic. I know he was my group member and it could have affected my grade but I thought it was hilarious. I had to turn my head away from the audience so they didn't see me smiling. That's what you get when you barely do any work on the project and then don't practice the presentation. He even had note cards. It was great.

Eventually it was my turn. I went kind of fast through talking about the different channels we were going to run our commercials on but I think that was because I was looking forward to showing the storyboards I had drawn. The first commercial seemed to go over well and then we got to the second one. For the first one I had cut and pasted different clip art stuff together. For the second one I drew all of it. All of the people were stick figures but I thought it worked out well. When I got to the stick figure driving I had put the steering wheel too far away so the stick figure became very lanky. So I said "And then we have a shot of the wife driving, looking kind of out of it, off in her own world. And she apparently has extremely long legs.... but good posture." And then it went to the next slide as the class was laughing. I don't think it translates in text but the timing was perfect and it went over well. In my presentations I try to make the audience laugh at least once so mission accomplished.

During the class, as a form of attendance, the class has to write down which presentation they thought was the best. The teacher came up to one of my group members and I, we being the only two that really put an effort into the project, and told us that the class had picked our presentation as the best. Go us.

That night I had my first professional business dinner. The company that donated the money for the scholarships, the reason I got $1000, invited the winners out to dinner. It was a pretty cool experience. I got a chance to talk to both of the company representatives there and my professor. I found out that none of them actually had a real plan as to what they wanted to do when they were in college. The just kind of fell into what they ended up doing. That gave me a little hope considering I still have no clue what I want to do.